Comedy on the Home Front

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 622, 1 June 1951, Page 16

Comedy on the Home Front

(CHIPPER MALLOY AND CONNIE, a new comedy programme scheduled to start from all five Commercial stations at 9.0 p.m. on Monday, June 4 (it is to be a regular Monday night feature from these stations), is based on ‘the scripts of Fibber McGee and Molly, which Americans have been listening to and laughing at for the past 15 years. In its adapted form, however, it has an Australian setting. Never before (according to Chipper) has one man been the champion in so many fields as Chipper Malloy. Back in Canada (he tells Connie) he excelled as a deer-stalker, at shooting rapids, football and baseball. Crack ice-hockey

teams used to pale when Fearless, Malloy, the Canadian Madman, took the ice. He was something of a mecedern Hercules, too, though he is strangely tired when Connie wants him to mow the lawn, ’ At home Chipper fancies himself as a handyman, and the fact that the things he sets out to fix will probably never work again after his expert atten- | tion doesn’t worry him at all. Fortunately Connie is never far away when Chipper becomes involved, and when the situation gets beyond him she is there to save the day-and Chipper’s face. Playing the name parts in Chipper Malloy and Connie are Monte Richardson, who went to Australia with the Americanadian Dance Band, and Connie Hobbs, who (with her husband Jack Murray) toured for ENSA entertaining troops in West Africa during the war. Mrs. Bracegirdle, a high-class neighbour of the Malloys, is played by Rita Pauncefort. Mrs. Bracegirdle is just "a pain in the neck" to Chipper, though Connie is constantly in awe of her very superior knowledge of art and letters. Others in the show (some of them do not appear in the earlier episodes) include Muriel Flood as Lydia (the child with the shrill questions), John Cazabon as Mr. Winkle (a refined little man with murderous intent towards his long-suffer- . ing, hen-pecking wife), Owen Ainley as Old Ned (another neighbour and something of a snooper), John Tate as a meteorologist (who can’t give a plain yes or no to any question), Bill Rees as Doc Tramble and Lloyd Berrell as Mr. Rogers.